In Persian, a commercial product that is unopened and in its original packaging is described as being آکبند. I encountered this word for the first time in an article on Iranian tech website Digiato about restrictions on returning travelers bringing mobile phones into Iran, in the following context:

In a post on 1Doost.com, Nooshin Mohammad Ali provides what seems to me to be a dubious folk etymology, claiming (while citing no source) that it’s derived from the English “UK Band” which supposedly was printed on ribbons wrapped around British goods arriving at the port of Abadan before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

An interesting but ultimately inconclusive discussion of the etymology of آکبند extracted from the Adabiyat listserv appears on The Iranianhere.

Recently, the question of how best to translate the English phrase “including, but not limited to” has crossed my desk. Google Translate offers از جمله، اما نه محدود به which seems quite good, and I’ve found an example of its use (multiple times) on a webpage of Iran’s Islamic Parliament Research Center, where the “but not limited to” part is placed in parentheses از جمله (اما نه محدود به). The same page sometimes uses شامل instead of از جمله.

Today’s word is تازه‌نفس (tazeh-nafas), which literally means “fresh of breath” and more generally simply “fresh” or It is especially used to describe military forces, and that is how I found it used today in an article on BBC Persian titled: آمریکا ‘صدها سرباز’ تازه نفس به هلمند می‌فرستد (“U.S. sends ‘hundreds’ of fresh soldiers to Helmand”).

In this “Persian Word of the Day” series, I’ll be highlighting noteworthy Persian words or phrases that may be of interest to fellow students of the Persian language.

Today’s word is خبرساز (khabarsaz) which literally means “news-making.” Farhang Moaser Kimia defines it as “that makes headlines, sensational” and notes that it is a new word. There is an Iranian news site called Khabarsaz.